


Seeds of Discord Part 14

by kbj1123



Series: Wonder Woman & Captain America [15]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure & Romance, Crossover Pairings, F/M, One True Pairing, Sexual Content, Superheroes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 00:37:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3309161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kbj1123/pseuds/kbj1123
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone or something is causing violent riots to erupt all over the U.S., and whatever it is, it wreaks havoc with both Wonder Woman's health and Bruce Banner's ability to keep his rage in check.</p><p>The rescue, part 2</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeds of Discord Part 14

While she is bound here, sleep is a weapon that strikes her from behind. Sometimes it is Hypnos’ doing, but she suspects not often. She is not angry anymore. In her waking dream, she somehow slipped between the cracks of this world and the one that exists between sleep and Olympus. The hand of Artemis comforted her. Artemis, her mother’s patron goddess, held and soothed her, and sent her to her brother. They made her remember. She feels re-awakened. 

Diana awakens because Eris is poking her in the shoulder with something sharp. Phanes leans on the edge of a table in front of her and leers. “Good morning, your highness,” Nyx practically sings. “I hope you don’t mind the rude awakening, but while you were asleep, Phanes fixed your bindings to his own liking. Are the new shackles comfortable, my dear?” Diana doesn’t reply. “Anyway, we have a surprise for you. Would you like to see it?” He doesn’t wait for a response. He nods to Eris, who, along with Hypnos, walks out of the room. Her boot heels click sharply on the stone slabs of the floor, and echo down the corridor. A few moments later, Nyx puts his hand to his earpiece and says, “very well then,” and then turns to his colleague and says, I suppose I’ll leave you unchaperoned for a while, then. He retreats off after Eris. Diana instinctively clenches and flexes her fists in their shackles. 

She closes her eyes again and inhales deeply. This place is warm and slightly damp, and smells like fear. She remembers Bruce’s words. “Make friends with whatever’s going on, so that it’ll leave you in peace.” So she breathes deeply, and lets fear, and its icy heat, creep through her. She gives it permission to settle in the bottoms of her lungs, where it pools like oil. The fear in her body grows a hundred hands, and each finger of each hand squeezes around her lungs, her heart, her abdomen. She is so cold that her body burns. She watches it burn with detached interest. “Is that all you are?” she wonders. “Physical sensation?” The fear shows her horrible pictures: she sees Steve, bound as she is, subjected to this torture. She sees every face of every dead man, woman, and child she could not save when she liberated the camps. She sees the nameless scientist at Sachsenhausen, and she sees herself slamming his head into the chemicals spilled all over his metal work table. The images come so quickly she wants to howl from the agony. Sleep doesn’t assault her this time. The images assault her and Fear’s hands squeeze, but they can only squeeze so hard, and the memories can only loop around her head so many times before they no longer effective.

“Only images,” she reminds herself, and notices she’s been holding her breath. She wills herself to inhale slowly again, paying attention to the way each muscle between each rib stretches. When she exhales, the ribs knit together again. She hasn’t felt sensation in her arms or hands for a long time, she thinks. Her abdomen relaxes. She saw Steve. She saw him in that place where nothing really exists. She wonders if he saw her as well. 

She is vaguely aware that her captor is leering at her, moving his fingers over her bare shoulder, playing with the few threads holding one bra strap in place. Her abdominal muscles tense. She exhales again, gives fear and anger permission to tell her why they have come, and then she lets them go. Through her closed lids, she observes a new source of light in front of her, as if someone has opened window blinds. “Open your eyes, Princess Diana, you have an audience.” It is Nyx’s voice piped in from another room. She obeys. “Oh no.”

In a mirror image of this room, Steve is shackled to a wall. He sees her as well. She knows this because his eyes go wide and panicked. He’s in his Captain America uniform, except for the helmet. His hair is unkempt, and he has a couple of days’ worth of stubble. Phanes laughs. “Who goes first, Eris, you or Phanes?” Nyx asks. He flips a coin. “Heads,” she hears Eris say.” Nyx looks at the coin and says, “heads it is, my dear!” Phanes ignores them and leans against the wall across from Diana to watch Steve get tortured. She shuts her eyes again to find her composure. 

“Breathe, Diana. You are here, in this place, right now. Find your way home from here.” This is her constant reminder to herself. She softens the muscles of her chest and her jaw. She offers up a prayer to Artemis and Aphrodite, “My home and my nature are the heart. The heart is my true nature. Lead my heart from darkness into light, from the unreal to the real.” 

She exhales slowly. Every muscle from the crown of her head to her throat, through her heart center and into her belly unravels with the goddesses’ response: “I was never born, nor can ever die, as I am not the body, mind and intellect, but the eternal, blissful consciousness that serves as the substratum of all creation." On her next inhalation, an invisible ball of energy forms between her shackled hands. It is warm and tangible. The warm energy of her own connectivity to every living thing forms a kind of blanket around her. She is perfectly safe. More importantly, she can make sure her husband is perfectly safe. The energy of her intuition is dark indigo. It is deep, almost the color of the night sky before it turns black. 

The floor is warm. Everything else feels cold. There is a difference between suffering and pain. She understands this now. She stops resisting the pain. She imagines exhaling everything that she does not need. She lets go of her fight against the fear, and Fear’s fists close in on themselves and self-immolate. Surrender can only lead to surrender. She regards Fear with a mixture of pity and compassion. She lets Fear go, as if she were releasing a butterfly from the palm of her hand. There is nothing to fight. She exhales through her lips, and the air feels cool. When Fear leaves her body, she senses that it is beautiful, loveable, and important. She knows it will return to her many times, in many new guises. She will not think of it until the next time.

“Open your eyes,” he commands. She complies.

He taps a button on the wall and says, “Nyx, stop.”

“You’ll get your turn,” Eris tells him impatiently.

“That’s not it. Something is wrong.”

Eris and Nyx put down the knives they’d been preparing and look down through the glass wall of their room, into Diana’s. Steve stops struggling. Diana is changing. She is dressed in a costume Steve has never seen before. Her bodice and leggings are the darkest blue he’s ever seen, and her boots, which go past the knees, are the color of the moon. Her eagle breastplate, tiara and belt match her boots: dark silver, like stars on a clear night. Only her lasso is the same. Hephaestus forged that; there is only one like it, he recalls. Her hair hangs in long, loose waves. She pulls one arm away from the wall, then the other, and the shackles fall from her wrists. What is truly striking to him though, is that she does not look angry, or even threatening. She looks absolutely…is there even a word? Centered? Regal? Deified? 

Before Phanes can react, she is completely unfettered. She kicks the loose slab in the floor away and sweeps up Artemis’s bow and quiver. Phanes braces himself to run, but Diana is too quick. Two arrows fly in rapid succession, pinning him to the stone floor by the wrists. The sons of Nyx’s namesake, the goddess of darkness, rush into the room: Ker, the god of violent death, Orzys, the god of misery and woe, and Erebos, god of pain, fall to the ground in a flurry of silver arrows. “You are powerless when bound by Earthly men in this dimension,” Phanes whispers incredulously. Diana smiles sympathetically. “You are not an Earthly man,” she replies. You would have been better off keeping me bound by Nyx’s hand. She drops Artemis’s gifts to the ground. As she leaves the room, silver light fills the room in a great blast, and when it fades, Artemis’s weapons and those who were pierced by her arrows have vanished. 

By the time she finds Steve, his captors are gone, and he is asleep, presumably courtesy of Hypnos. She unchains him and guides him to the floor, kneeling and resting his head in her hands. She bends over and kisses his brow, his nose, and his mouth. “Steve,” wake up. She uses almost every iota of control she has to not break down. She will not give herself permission to fall apart. He is safe. He is with her. Nothing else matters right now. “Steve, please wake up.” A dark, silvery tear falls to his forehead, slides over one of his lids, and into the corner of his eye. He blinks awake, takes her by the shoulders and pulls her down. He holds her so tightly and presses his cheek to hers. His beard is scratchy and soft, and wet with both their tears. It takes several moments for either of them to realize there is a difference between their own bodies’ shaking, the release of so much fear and sorrow, and the shaking of the floor beneath them as the rig begins its self-destruct sequence.


End file.
